"Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 3.6, the latest version of the popular free desktop, as well as the GNOME developer platform. GNOME 3.6 is the third major update of GNOME 3. It builds on the foundations that we have laid with the previous 3.x releases and offers a greatly enhanced experience. The exciting new features and improvements in this release include a new login experience, integrated input methods, a refresh of the message tray, support for more online accounts, improved accessibility, and many more."

We used to have a major popular desktop - Gnome 2 that was seen by all new Linux users. It wasn't perfect but it was adequate and it became a de-facto standard Linux desktop. That standardization was perhaps its biggest achievement.

We know what happened later. The desktop has been abandoned by its developers. Worse, by making Gnome 3 explicitly incompatible with Gnome 2 they have effectively killed the latter. Yes, there is Mate but (1) it no longer has the support Gnome 2 enjoyed, (2) it is 3 years behind in development (2 years for development of Gnome 3 plus 1 year for renaming all components so that they don't clash with Gnome 3).

Yes, we can say we still have Xfce (I've been using it even in Gnome 2 days because in many was it was better than it), Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, LXDE, E17 and, yes, Gnome 3 and Unity. But we no longer have that ecosystem Gnome 2 was.